"This is a pivotal moment that will carry with it a wave of change, the ripples of which will reach far beyond videogames" - Steven Spielberg

Previously code-named "Project Natal," the slim black Kinect sensor plugs directly into any Xbox 360. Despite its small size, the Kinect device contains a camera, audio sensors, and motion-sensing technology that tracks 48 points of movement on the human body. It has the ability to recognize faces and voices.

With Kinect, game-players no longer need to memorize different commands for a hand-held control. You are the controller, simply step in front of the sensor and Kinect sees you move, hears your voice and recognizes your face.

Kinect brings games and entertainment to life in extraordinary new ways - no controller required. Easy to use and instantly fun, Kinect gets everyone off the sofa moving, laughing and cheering. See a ball? Kick it. Control an HD movie with a wave of the hand. Want to join a friend in the fun? Simply jump in. With Kinect, technology evaporates, letting the natural magic in all of us shine. And the best part is Kinect works with every Xbox 360.

With the Kinect sensor, you can experience gaming like never before. Easy to use and fun for everyone, the Kinect sensor utilizes revolutionary full-body tracking to put you in the center of the fun. This amazing new technology allows the sensor to recognize your body and mirror your movements in the game, making you the controller. The sensor is compatible with every Xbox 360 and comes with the Kinect: Adventures! game.

With Kinect Xbox 360 now has the best controller ever made - you.

You are the controller - Introducing Kinect, a revolutionary new way to play: no controller required! See a ball? Kick it, hit it, trap it or catch it. Unlike 2D cameras and controllers, Kinect tracks your full body movement in 3D, while responding to commands, directions, even a difference of emotion in your voice.

Personalised play:Kinect provides an in-game experience in which the player's face and voice are recognised. Greet and speak to characters in the game, or simply step into view of the sensor to log into Xbox LIVE and connect with friends. Only Kinect is smart enough to remember voices and faces. Fun has never been so personalised.

Off-the-couch play:Kinect provides gameplay that gets you off the couch, on your feet and in the fun. Each Kinect experience is designed to get players moving, laughing, cheering and playing together. Kinect makes social gaming off-the-couch fun.

Kinect: Adventures!Float in outer space. Experience the thrill of roaring rapids. Tackle mountaintop obstacle courses. And dive into the deep to explore a leaky underwater observatory - all from your living room. With Kinect: Adventures, you are the controller as you jump, dodge and kick your way through exciting adventures set in a variety of exotic locations.

Controller-free gaming and entertainment.Kinect provides a whole new way to play. It uses a sensor to track your body movement and recognise your face, even listen to your voice. If you know how to move your hands, shake your hips, or speak, you and your friends will be able to jump instantly into any Kinect experience

Full-body play.Kinect provides a new way to play where you use all parts of your body - head, hands, feet and torso. With controller-free gaming you don't just control the superhero, you are the superhero. Full-body tracking allows the Kinect sensor to capture every move, from head to toe, to give players a full-body gaming experience

Easy-to-play fun.Kinect makes sharing in the fun a snap. Talk or watch a movie in the same living room or on the other side of the world - no headset, no keyboard and no controllers required. It's just you, your friends and your family

Kinect: Adventures!

Explore the world from the comfort of your living room. Jump, duck and dodge in beautiful mountaintop obstacle courses, test your reflexes in Rallyball, or experience anti-gravity in outer space. With 20 adventures to complete, there is plenty of action to go around

Dive into social adventures. Whether you want to play for five minutes or five hours, Kinect: Adventures is a rich mine for fun with friends and family members. Take turns jumping in and out of games whenever you like, or jump onto Xbox LIVE to play online

customer Reviews

5Calibrate correctly and it will work!

The kit its self is amazing although their is a minimum height recommendation of around 40 inches (1 meter / just over 3ft) so younger kids won't register correctly with the censor.

I keep seeing people talk about lag, I've not noticed any lag, in fact its very responsive but I think thats down to the fact that I took a little more time to make sure it was calibrated correctly. Our room lighting isn't bright, but it lights the place up and I imagine the lighting also has an affect on how responsive the device is.

If you've calibrated and lit your room but notice some lag, try closing the curtains because perhaps there is some other light affecting your Kinects sensor.

I thought more about how this could be better and some kind of button control for FPS and similar, perhaps a glove control like in Minority Report?

I'm impressed, I love the Wii and I'm an old school Mario fan, but this tops it. Joyride is comparable to Mario Kart.

2MS's new controller, is it any good?

I waited at my local Asda for an hour last night to get this and after eagerly handing over the money, i rushed home to try it out.

The packaging was average and i found that because i had treat my 360 well (and as such i was running an early 360) i was rewarded with the faff of an aditional adaptor.

After the firmware update - which was quite slow to download bespite having a very fast BB connection - i finally had a working Kinect... well, once i had cleared an enormous amount of room space and added more lighting. I see why they have large, wide open, overlit spaces in the adverts. But thats a small price to pay.

I suppose the control of the dashboard is ok, although not very intuative to start with. However, Kinect isnt about dashboard control, its about game control.

Im sorry to say that despite what you may have heard, this is far from the next generation of game control. Even allowing for the fact that this is new technology to MS, its still noticably laggy and lacks the precision of Playstation's Move or even the Wii's wimote, due to the (by modern standards) lower resolution camera. Its also obvious how much processing power this device requires to make it work, which brings me on to the next part...

The game its self plays like a graphicaly enhanced Wii game, with all the inherant flaws there in. It then dawned on me, that this is a very limited controller, in terms of the games you could play. There are no buttons, so any action must only be gesture related. This may work acceptably for puzzle or maybe driving games but it certainly wont work for RPGs or FPSs.

In summary, its an expensive accessory (let's not be shy about it, its nearly the price of a new console), which needs a quite specific environment to work in and has limited use/functionality for the average gamer. Yes, the technology is interesting but its technology for technology's sake.

This control system is slightly behind the wimote and, sadly, miles behind the Playstations Move controller.

2Its a pretty average controller at a very expensive price

The concept certainly isn't new, The playstation 2 with the eyetoy was the first console to introduce controller free gaming using a camera. Of course the technology is now updated with the xbox360, but is it worth 130 pounds?

To be quite frank no, most commentators are hoping firmware updates will fix the faults, unfortunately the kinect uses a very low resolution sensor, so it will never get better at sensing / detecting, firmware cant upgrade hardware. It will always be quite imprecise and will always be quite laggy. The camera itself apparently costs around 35 pounds to make, so there is quite a heavy mark up for the price as well.

There is a reason both Nintendo and Sony turned this technology down, you are the controller, but with no controller you are left to run on the spot to actually run you have no buttons so have no way of firing weapons or using tools.. Its great for dancing and excercise, for anything else its mediocrity at its finest and will probably drop down in price quite heavily after christmas.

3On the fence still.

The technology behind Kinect is impressive and it has the potential to deliver entirely unique experiences that the several motion camera experiments that have already been made for video games consoles never could have come close to. The issue is that none of the games are attempting to offer a compelling experience and Microsoft is doing everything to make their core base of gamers feel excluded from the experience.

My honest suggestion for those who are still on the fence is to wait it out until next year (when the bigger releases pile on; Kinect Star Wars, etc.). Because right now there is certainly no rush to buy this (that is, if you're into motion controls in the first place). No game release as of yet is going to make you certainly rush to the shops just to buy the Kinect.

My concern is finding out how well the Kinect will do in the games department months down the line. Will it continue to give us shovelware like the Wii did? Or will it, in time, bring better and brighter experiences in the gaming world. It's hard to say.

5You can only fully appreciate the fun with a Kinect party!

I'm not reviewing the technology of Kinect, I'm just going to say how much FUN it is! In addition to the supplied Adventures games, we bought Kinect Sports and Dance Central and invited a few friends around to play it. There were seven of us, male, female, ages ranging from 23 to 61, some of whom had no previous interest in video games. It was an absolute hoot, everybody had a go. It's a long time since we all laughed together so much! It's definitely not just for children, it's for anybody who has an inner child and doesn't mind making a fool of themselves. Just get one and have fun.

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